Suited (12 page)

“You seem to know a lot about the process,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, sheepishly. “Insider knowledge.”

The majority of the enforcers created the same rough circle as we had, keeping spectators away from the crevasses. Three broke away from the group and wandered the site, carrying large slides and apparently making notes, if their twitching fingers were anything to go by. Another, his uniform more ornate and a large roaring bear’s head emblazoned above his heart, was already talking to Natasha and Kichlan. I wondered how they would explain the Keeper, the door, and the poor Hon Ji Half of whom nothing remained.

“No healers, unless they think Kichlan needs one,” Aleksey continued. He grinned, winced, and touched his lip. “Or me,” he added. “Then architects to fix the street, excavators to provide raw materials, engineers to re-establish any broken pion paths. Like that lamp, I’d say. When it is recreated it will need to be connected to the network again, so an engineer would repair the path to allow the pions can get through. The usual.”

When I had been an architect I had known “the usual” quite well. In fact, as the centre of a nine point circle I had often organised it. Not when enforcers were involved, however. My circle created, we did not repair.

I mentioned none of this, however, and asked, instead, “Insider knowledge?”

“Ah, yes.” He rubbed the scar on his nose. “Used to be an enforcer.”

“Before you fell.”

He nodded, quiet for a moment, his face folded into shadow and free of expression. But it lasted only a moment, before his half-smile returned. “Life as an enforcer wasn’t half as dramatic as debris collecting seems to be though.”

“Like I said, this is not normal. Debris collecting is dank, dirty, and tedious. It involves long days of walking, crawling and climbing. We don’t usually come across bodies.” Or fight for the stability of the world, I wanted to say, but didn’t entirely believe it.

The lights strengthened as the enforcer continued to speak to Kichlan and Natasha. Lad, obviously relieved of his initial fear, wandered across the square, trying a little too hard to look casual.

“Bro is lying,” he whispered as he passed us, hands clasped behind his back, chin tucked close to his chest. “Not telling them about him, or about you.”

“Oh?” Aleksey did not sound concerned, despite his previous employment, merely curious. “How are they explaining this all then?”

“Big explosion.” Lad unclasped his hands long enough to make explosive movements. “Like last time.”

That sounded like a good approach to me. The debris explosions that had rocked Movoc-under-Keeper would still be fresh in the enforcers’ minds. Perhaps it would be enough to prevent any further questions.

“Are they creating the lights?” I asked Aleksey, as Lad wandered away again.

He nodded. “One man has that job. Torchbearer. Always harder to keep the peace in the dark.”

“I can imagine.”

Finally, the centre enforcer dismissed Natasha and Kichlan with a wave of his hand. They joined us. Natasha looked haggard, Kichlan like he could barely stand. Lad slipped an arm beneath his brother’s shoulder, and I was surprised he accepted the support.

“They believed us,” Natasha said.

The rest of the teams closed around us, forming a tight knot of debris collectors as the square filled with pion-binders.

“You and Kich are very smart,” Lad said, in all seriousness. Natasha smiled at him wanly.

“They don’t need us any more, do they?” My throat still stung and my pains were deep. A bed was all I truly needed. “Can we leave? We’ve done our job, after all.” Not all those aches were physical.

“Yes, we have,” Kichlan said. “Sofia, can you put something in that?” He glanced at the bag at her feet, carrying the few collecting jars we had not been able to fill. “Yours too, Mizra. The enforcers think we subdued an emergency tonight. I doubt they’ve ever seen a collecting jar, but let’s try and stay on the safe side. Pretend we collected so much we can barely carry it all.”

But how would we pretend to the veche, when they came to take the full jars away and found only empty ones?

Sofia and Mizra hunted for rubbish to weigh their bags down. Physical debris – I thought, with a wry smile to myself – pretending to be our debris.

I needed to get home. To lie curled around the sickness in my belly, to peel back coat sleeve and shirt and uniform and see just what the debris had done to my arm when it had torn the suit from my skin. But most of all I needed to get away from the memory of the Hon Ji Half falling to pieces in my hands and from Sofia’s too-attentive gaze.

“Ah, Tanyana?” Mizra pulled me from my distraction with a tense, warning tone. “I think you need to see this.”

What now? What more would the puppet men throw at me in one night?

I looked up. There, standing beside the enforcer, was Devich, Volski and Tsana. All three were pale in the floating pion lights, and looked shocked.

“Of all the architects in Movoc-under-Keeper.” The nine point circle I had once commanded was a well-maintained machine of precision and power. Unless the remnants of my circle had fallen very far in my absence – which I severely doubted – they were not the kind of circle usually called upon fix cracks in a market floor. No matter how deep.

“What’s he doing here?” Kichlan fixed growling-dog eyes on Devich.

“Good question.” An architect’s circle was necessary, I knew that, even one so powerful and so out of place, but what was a debris suit technician doing here? “It’s all a little convenient, don’t you think?”

If anything, Kichlan’s expression darkened further.

“That’s the lady, isn’t it, Tan?” Lad piped up. “The lady that fixed our ceiling. All on her own, she did it. Didn’t she?”

“That’s right, Lad.”

Around me, I felt the members of my old collecting team sharpen. They knew Devich, they knew who he was and what he had done, and with Lad’s prompting they recognised Tsana as well. I could almost feel their suspicions rise, their alertness increase, as they scanned the market crowds for the puppet men.

It was a good feeling. I straightened. I was warmed by it, and strengthened by it. I was not alone.

“Your architect’s circle?” Kichlan whispered.

I nodded, ran a hand through my short and poorly cropped hair, and approached the members of my once-circle, taking a wide path around the crumbling ground. Kichlan fell into step at my left shoulder. Lad tried to follow, but Sofia and Aleksey held him back.

“Tanyana?” Volski noticed me first, and his attention drew Devich and Tsana’s gaze. Devich looked even worse than the last time I had seen him. He was thinner, the clothes that had once looked so effortlessly good on him draped loose over his frame. His face was bloodless, his eyes too large and frightened as they met mine. He looked like he didn’t want to be there at all.

But he was Devich, so it could all be an act. A lie. A pretty extreme one, certainly, but I had trusted him once and refused to do so again. No matter how he seemed to sway on his feet and dissolve into the market shadows like he was becoming one himself.

Volski and Tsana, however, I did trust. The older man hurried to meet me. He held my hands and peered at my face, sending quick glances up at Kichlan who doubtless glowered down upon him. But Volski was not one to be intimidated, not even by Kichlan on a night as bad as this one. “Tanyana,” Volski said. “You look terrible.”

I laughed, sharp and sore in my throat, before leaning forward and kissing him lightly on the cheek. I hoped my breath didn’t reek. “I probably do.” Volski was weathered by years of working in the sun and the harsh Movoc wind, his skin roughly lined and darkened. But even at this late bell he was clean-shaven, his silvering hair immaculately styled, his dark, high-necked jacket – a row of bear-head badges shining from his shoulders – perfectly pressed.

I introduced him to Kichlan, who crossed his arms and nodded. Tsana wrapped me in a light embrace, barely touching me, and her high-necked jacket smelled of cumin and rose. A daughter of an old family with powerful veche connections, she was perhaps not as skilled as someone in her situation should be. After all, it was her mistake that had given me my first set of scars, but she was always graceful, even in the middle of all this chaos.

I tried to ignore how filthy I was, compared to the two of them. But I was aware of every patch in my second-hand clothing, the stench of sewerage and ever-present damp that my life as a debris collector had infused into the cloth, and the blood and vomit stains, newly gained that night.

Before Grandeur fell – before the puppet men and the veche had thrown me from her hand, eight hundred feet in the air – I had been a binder just like them. I had been the best of them. Now we belonged in different worlds. Different realities, I supposed, separated by the silver drilled into my bones.

“Are you hurt?” Volski hissed. He gestured to the great gashes in the ground. “What happened?”

“Debris,” I answered. “Debris happened.” In a way. I pulled him a little closer. “What are you doing here? Surely this isn’t the kind of job you usually do, a patch and repair?”

Volski started to shake his head, but Devich interrupted before he could speak.

“This is not a simple patch and repair.” He approached us. Behind him, the enforcers parted the crowd again and allowed the rest of the architect circle in. I noticed two new faces, and no sign of Llada, who had taken over my role as critical centre. “Please set up your circle, lady Tsana. This area needs to be stabilised as quickly as possible.”

Too much information to take in, all at once. “Lady?” I said, before I could stop myself. “Tsana, you’re the circle centre? What happened to Llada?”

She gave an elegant shrug. “Replacing you, Tanyana, was too hard on Llada. She opted for a smaller circle, and I was made centre.” She smiled delicately, before turning away.

I shared my surprised look with Volski, who shrugged, a decidedly inelegant gesture on him. “I know,” was all he said, all that needed to be said. He followed Tsana.

Tsana was not skilled enough to control a nine point circle. But I supposed veche connections could take you far, even after almost killing your critical centre.

“You should leave,” Devich said. He didn’t try to grab me like he had last time. Instead, his tone was distant, almost defeated. “You’ve done your job here, and it is not safe to remain.”

That didn’t sound like the Devich I knew. “Devich? What’s wrong?”

Kichlan bristled beside me. “Have you forgotten what this man did to you? Ignore him, Tanyana. Just turn your back and walk away. He does not need your sympathy.”

“I know that,” I said. “And he won’t get it. No matter how good an act he puts on.”

Tsana was organising her circle. Evidently unsure of the integrity of the ground she had them form their nine points tightly around her, rather than around the stones they would be repairing. It was less efficient that way. Better to cast your pions across the entire building site then knot them to the side. But she was the circle centre, not me. So I looked away.

Devich, to my surprise, barely reacted to Kichlan and me at all. “An act?” he said, slowly, like he was trying to remember what the words meant. He looked down to his arm and started plucking at the sleeve. A strange habit, and new.

Tsana and her circle began to work. A great grinding noise rose from the ground beneath us, and the entire market square shook. A few of the remaining poly stalls that had survived the debris attack cracked, and sand slid loose from the buildings around us. Clumsy work. Kichlan wrapped an arm around my shoulders, holding me up before I even realised I needed the help. For all the sound and movement very little was happening to the fractures in the ground. A mesh of concrete and iron formed to fill the gaps, but it came out spongy, uneven, and collapsed too quickly into mud.

“Strange,” Devich said. He twisted his sleeve into a tight ball of material, revealing an inch or two of what should have been skin. Instead, Devich was silver.

I studied the reflective surface wrapped around his wrist. No swirling symbols or shining lights, so what was it? Then I shook my head at myself. Was I being gullible? Perhaps. But damn, this was a pretty comprehensive deception. “What is?”

At first he didn’t answer. The cloth in his fist began to tear.

“Devich?” I laid a hand on his arm, and he flinched, staring at me with a sudden flash of horror. “What’s strange?”

“No,” he whispered, words little louder than breath. “Please. I tried, I did. So please. Not me too.”

“What are you doing?” Kichlan hissed. I waved him back, earning a dark scowl.

“Devich?” I leaned closer. “What’s wrong?”

“Pions.” Fast breaths and quick blinking. He released his torn sleeve. “The pions are wrong.” He gestured to the market square.

Pions? Confused, I followed his gaze. “Why? What are they doing?”

He tapped his forehead, rubbed at his eyes. “Can’t tell. Difficult now. I think, I think they’re running away.” He stared at me in such fear and uncertainty that I was reminded of Lad. And it shook me. “Vanishing. Where could they go, Tanyana? What does it mean? What happened here?”

Vanishing? Pions didn’t vanish. They changed, yes, as they created and destroyed at our command. But pions were eternal. What could be happening to them? Were they running away, fleeing to some deeper part of the world where even a nine point circle couldn’t coax them into life? Or falling prey to residue emptiness, to the very memory of an open door?