Authors: Jo Anderton
Could he? True, our suits were not the same, but we had the same foundation. We were both built from debris. “I– I suppose you could.” Disrupt the pion systems, disable the lock. “But I’m not sure–”
“And that is why you vacillate, unable to do anything. That is why you collect when you should fight. Because you are unsure.”
I stepped back from him, stunned. Where had that come from?
“I, however, believe in what I am doing.” He glanced at Lad. “You should tell him that. The Keeper. Tell him he still has servants who respect him, and are willing to risk anything to aid him.” Fedor plunged his blade into the pion lock’s blank, crystalline screen.
For a moment, the lock spluttered and fizzed sparks round Fedor’s suit. Hardly what I had expected. “Didn’t I tell you,” he said with a smirk, “that I had all the strength we–”
The entire laboratory lit up, splattering light across the cloud-laden night sky, and Volski and Zecholas both threw themselves to the ground. “Get down!” Volski cried. “All of you!”
Kichlan dragged Lad to the stones and shielded him with his body. My suit spread into a wide screen of its own accord. And as the laboratory shone too-bright, too-sharp, I closed my eyes and turned my face away. Until Fedor started screaming.
I dragged my suit back in so I could see what was happening. It protested, tugged and pinched and performed all its usual tantrum-like tricks, but grudgingly obeyed. Fedor was strung up in invisible threads, at least six feet in the air, suit torn from the lock, wrists together above his head and legs akimbo. He shook as the air sizzled, and the pion bindings that defended the laboratory attempted to incapacitate him. But something wasn’t quite right. A pathetic wailing sound – more like a crying child than an alarm – rose and fell. And the building flickered, the lights that surged apparently sourceless from the very walls, stuttering like a massive faulty lamp.
I grabbed Volski and Zecholas and dragged them to their feet. “Something’s wrong with the defence system. Look at it, is that really what you expected from such a complex systems of bonds?” Still, it took some coaxing to convince them to approach the building.
Fedor’s Unbound team had lost their protective cover of shadows but still held back, gaping up at him in horror. Only Yicor approached us.
“By the Keeper,” he whispered. “What is happening to him?”
“Not here,” Lad muttered. “He is not here to help.”
“The building’s defences are like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Zecholas squinted as he stared deep into the laboratory, far deeper than concrete and steel. “There are people behind that door. Heavily armoured, reinforced.”
“Enforcers?” I asked.
“Actually, closer to Mob. Strengthened, lengthened and carrying big knives. But they can’t get out.” His eyes refocused on my face. “And we should be thankful. The lock is malfunctioning. I think it’s trying to shock Fedor, knock him out, keep him there for those boys with their awful anatomy to catch. Instead, it has fused the doors and the walls into one big mess of knots and steel.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how long it will take for them to get out, or how long the lock will keep doing that.” He gestured at Fedor, who spasmed above us and cried out weakly.
“Can’t you help him?” One of the Unbound – Yan, I thought his name was – pleaded, his voice constricted.
“Either way, we will have company soon.” Volski was scanning the roofs, tracing the lines of pion bindings that I could not see. His sturdy jaw was set, his eyes serious but always so calm. “An alert has been sent. Down the light threads, one through the heating, probably through sewer pipes too. I’d safely assume they are using every binding available to them. Even if I could intercept each one they are too strong, too complicated, for me to unravel without a circle at my back.”
“Even you?” I asked, gently. Volski had far more skill than he would ever admit to.
Volski did not smile. “I’d guess we’ll have more of those Mob to deal with – or whatever they are – in less than a quarter bell.”
We had to get away from the laboratory, fast. It was time to cut Fedor free. I drew a deep breath. “We need to free him.”
“I can’t undo that.” Zecholas gestured to the door. “The two of us together couldn’t do it. I’m not even sure your circle could have, my lady.” His shoulders sagged. “If this is why you brought us here then I fear you were mistaken.”
But I shook my head. “Actually, I’d hoped to avoid this all together.” I straightened, clenched fists and promised the suit a chance to spread its wings. “But we have to deal with what we’re given.” I turned to Kichlan. “Will you help me?”
He blinked back surprise. “Ah, of course.”
Together we closed in on the door. Zecholas, it seemed, couldn’t help but follow. “What are you doing?”
“Fedor was right about the suits, in a way.” I slid both my hands into blades, small and tight compared to Fedor’s overblown sword. “
My
suit can cut through anything, even the pion bonds that are holding him now. So that is what I’m going to do.”
Fedor’s suit was not my suit, no matter how far he pushed it, no matter the pain he forced himself to endure or the effort he went to, he did not have the strength to do what I could do. If he understood the consequences he might have counted himself lucky.
And lucky was just what he was. Either his suit had indeed disrupted the bindings in the pion lock or, and I considered this more likely, the building’s security systems were already weakening, just like everything in Movoc-under-Keeper. How many of the pions in its complicated and dangerous bindings had already fled, just like so many of their bright, energetic brothers?
“How can I help?” Kichlan asked.
I resisted an urge to kiss away that serious frown. “Catch him.”
I plunged the suit into the ground beneath me and reared above Fedor. Shuddering with each shock but still very much aware, he watched me with wide, white-rimmed eyes. Even then, I wouldn’t call it pleading. Damn him and his pride.
“Right,” I whispered to myself and the suit inside me. “No getting carried away. Make it quick, and get out.” But I could feel the buzz bubbling up, the need for release, to test the boundaries. It was so strong I rocked on my stilts and below, both Kichlan and Zecholas held out hands to catch me if I fell. If I only gave in, I could do more than cut Fedor’s bindings. I could destroy the entire system: lock and door and wall; lights and siren and alarm; sword and armour and strengthened body. What did those paltry binders think they could do against me? Against blades that could disrupt their very bodies, that could scramble their muscles, that could shatter their lives–
–like the Hon Ji Half?
I swallowed the suit down, forced back its urgency, its violence. That was not me.
Never me.
“None of that.” My throat hurt; the scratching of countless tiny wiggling worm-like wires?
I had no way of knowing exactly where the bindings were that suspended Fedor, but I could guess. So I extended my blades further, sharpened and narrowed them. Was that envy I could see in Fedor’s pain-wracked and incapacitated face? Even at a time like this, for the power he did not have and the price he did not understand?
“Keep still,” I whispered to him. And sliced.
The lock fought me, but I had known it would. Nothing, no pion system or debris outbreak or opening door would sit back and considerately allow its own destruction. Gleefully, the suit responded. As I sliced through the apparently empty air sparks travelled down my arms, latching onto my clothing and sizzling against my skin. Then the suit sent up two appendages like an insect’s antenna from my neck and absorbed the shocks.
Fedor’s arms hung free. His suit whipped back hard and fast into his wrists and he screamed again. But the lock no longer shocked him – indeed, all its energy seemed focused on my neck, and it buzzed and smelled like burning hair, too close to my ears for comfort. But I no longer felt any pain, even as the suit drank all that energy down and filled my bones and muscles with tingling.
“Don’t drop me!” Fedor gasped, hands cradled to his chest.
I lowered myself to cut around his legs. “Just be thankful I’m helping you at all.” The scratching in my throat muddled my voice, giving it a thick and ill sound.
With his left leg cut loose he hung at a strange angle, suspended only by his right leg and waist. Half folding in over himself, he could still look up at me in mistrust. “How can your suit do this? What are you?”
I freed his right leg, jerked up again, extended my blades and curved them, then cut away at every binding that could possibly exist around his middle. Fedor fell with a strangled scream straight into Kichlan’s waiting arms.
“I am not a weapon,” I whispered, and I lowered myself far more gently. The blades withdrew, but the suit fought me over its antenna. Only when I stepped away from the misfiring lock did it allow me to draw them back in.
Kichlan carried Fedor back to his Unbound. Yan and Egor helped him stand.
“Our thanks,” Yicor said, apparently for the entire group.
“Time to leave.” Volski gripped my elbow then cursed as a spark shot from my sleeve. I felt numb with the energy inside me, trembling from over-excited muscles and the ever-present tension in my bones growing stronger.
Wincing, he rubbed his hand. “They will be close by now.”
I nodded. “We need to get out of here.”
The Unbound supported Fedor and helped him run; away from the laboratory, down a narrow alleyway beside an empty apartment building. It had once been fenced off from the main street, now only a creaking, corrugated iron gate remained. Kichlan helped me drag it across the opening to the alley. The ground was littered with grates. Steam rose silent but pungent from below. I had trouble believing we were walking over a rill or effluent here. Even in the height of summer the water running in and out of the Tear did not boil and stink like this.
Was that debris, contained beneath our feet?
I remembered the crater in which I had found Devich, half-dead. All that remained of his technician’s laboratory. How much debris had it taken to create a force that could hurl buildings into the air like toys? Did the same amount boil and steam beneath us?
Running footsteps echoed around us, Volski risked another shock to grab my shoulder and halt me. “Enforcers,” he hissed, “or Mob, whatever they are. Surrounding the building. At the other end of this alley too!”
“Other’s rank breath!” Kichlan cursed. “What can we do?”
Fedor stared wistfully back at the laboratory he had tried to break into. I crouched, ran light fingers across the damp ground, and considered the plan I had – apparently – thought through so well but not been able to put into action.
“What are you doing? Yicor asked, and crouched with me.
“We need to get off the streets,” I said. “And quickly. Before the enforcers come down here, before we are found.”
A round of quiet agreement.
“So we do what we had always intended. We get inside the laboratory.”
There was a moment of stunned silence before Kichlan said, “What?”
I turned to Volski and Zecholas. “We’re above the storage vats already. Tell me if you can get us down there.” I pointed to the steaming ground.
“Tanyana?” Fedor this time. “I don’t understand.”
“When you tried to break in to that laboratory you triggered an emergency response that has summoned who knows how many enforcers, and alerted the ones inside the building to our presence. It’s only a matter of time before they find us here. Not only that, but in doing so you broke the lock. At the moment none of the enforcers inside can get out, but no more can get in either. I say we go inside, where they won’t be looking for us, and where there are less of them, and hopefully do what we came here to do in the first place.”
“How will we get in, though?” Yan asked.
I couldn’t stop myself grinning, despite everything. “That is why I brought my pion-binders.”
Mine.
They were already working, even while we spoke. Zecholas crouched, hands to the ground, eyes distant and mouth moving as he whispered to the particles deep in the earth below us. Volski stood above him, silent. After a moment Zecholas turned towards me and said, “Something is interfering. There are pions here, there has to be, but I just can’t get to them.”
“Like something that isn’t made of pions is getting in your way?” I asked. The cobblestones were pion-made, and the mortar below them. The earth itself should be rich with particles, enough for any decent binder to manipulate. But just like my suit blocked access to the pions inside my body, the debris vats below us meant that no binder, no matter how strong, could influence them.
Zecholas baulked. “Yes. How did you know?”
Not a question I was about to answer. “Debris.”
Curious expressions from both of my binders. “We can’t get in that way,” Volski said.
I had expected this.
“Then how?” Fedor asked.
I flashed a grin at him. “Watch. Watch and learn.” I clicked my fingers. Volski and Zecholas straightened instantly, and turned toward me. “Give me a simple formation. There are a lot of pion-binders rushing around here and we don’t want them to notice us, keep that in mind. Do nothing that would look out of the ordinary; follow the pattern of the building. Understand?”
Zoklski grinned. “Yes, my lady.”
“We are only two,” Volski pointed out. “We can’t make a circle.”
“When did I say you needed to?” I lifted an eyebrow. “I have enough work for both of you. Think you can handle that?”
“Of course.”
“So find me a path to the basement.”
“I don’t see a basement,” Zecholas said.
“There is one. Look
around
the grates here: you won’t be able to see
through
them. Talk to the building, follow its patterns inside, and then down. You’ll find it. It will be hidden, smothered. It will look like something impossible.”
After a moment Volski said, “I see it.” He wove invisible patterns in the air until Zecholas sucked in a sharp breath.
“Yes, of course. It stands out.” Zecholas glanced at me. “Below us, there is a gap. Empty where there should be light, a square-shaped void.”
I held his gaze, kept my expression blank. Did he see the same thing in me? If they did, my pion-binders said nothing. Volski and Zecholas were loyal.
“One of you get us down there, unseen. The other keep an eye on the enforcers and the security system. Work together. You’ve already had evidence of the kind of defences wound into this building. Don’t set them off again. Don’t give those men inside and outside a chance to find us. And keep me informed. I need to know when we are close to the enforcers, I need to know about every lock or hidden trigger. Tell me if anything strange happens. At all.” Because without them, I was blind.
My binders shared a glance and chose the way I knew they would. Zecholas – with his sharp mind and even sharper skill – stepped out into the alleyway and placed a hand on the flat and ugly concrete of the laboratory wall. Volski – always aware of the bigger picture – unfocused his gaze and appeared to stare at nothing.
“This way,” Volski whispered, after a moment. “Do you see the path?”
Zecholas nodded, and the concrete boiled where he touched it. It pulled back, exposing grey brickwork, then the bricks themselves changed. Zecholas was not moving them, not rearranging them to create a hole in the wall large enough for us to pass through, for such manipulation would have been felt throughout the building. Instead, he was altering the very nature of the bricks; removing the air, unbinding then reforming minerals, easing the ties of heat and drying water, so they shrunk into something harder, darker and misshapen. It was an efficient and silent way to create a person-sized hole. But only a binder as skilled as Zecholas could have done it without the help of a circle.
“Why are you doing this?” Kichlan hissed, close to my ear, just as fresh marching and shouting echoed down the alleyway. New, steady lights bobbed into view, and gradually began making their way toward us. That had to be the work of a Torchbearer. The rest of the enforcers could not be far behind.
“To get Lad off the streets. And do it now.”
Zecholas’s hole became a narrow tunnel that stretched into the building. We would, I assumed, be travelling inside walls where they were thick enough, through empty rooms, and down supporting beams.
“This won’t be comfortable,” Zecholas said.
“It doesn’t matter.” Someone kicked the rotting metallic gate at the end of the alley. “Just hurry!”
With a nod from Volski, Zecholas entered the tunnel. And we followed.
Zecholas was right, it wasn’t comfortable at all. Such deep and intensive pion manipulation created not only enough heat of its own to start us sweating, but lined the tunnel with warm debris. Kichlan, Lad and I scooped it up as we pushed our way through. The layer was thin, and we didn’t have anything to carry it in, but any we left would only make it harder for Zecholas to fill in the tunnel behind us.
It took Fedor a moment before he sullenly started collecting too.
“I thought you said it was safer in here than on the street,” Kichlan whispered, very close behind me in this small space. “So what are you worried about?”
I couldn’t turn to face him. In fact there was barely enough room to twist my head and look over my shoulder. “Apart from running out of air?”
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Yicor muttered, from behind Lad, who was following Kichlan and struggling not to scratch himself on the walls.
“There is plenty of air,” Zecholas said from ahead. “It’s just all hot.”
“You concentrate on what you’re doing,” I snapped.
“Yes, my lady.” I couldn’t see his smile, but I could hear it.
“That’s not what I mean,” Kichlan whispered, even lower. “What have you got him looking out for?”
“He has a name.”
“Tan.” How could he scold me that much with a single, shortened word?
“There are more defences than one lock on a door, you know that. Volski is making sure we don’t run into any of them.”
Kichlan did not respond, but I could feel that he was not satisfied. Even as Volski directed Zecholas – noting locks with wide-ranging trigger-threads, a small collection of technicians huddling away from the alarms, and enforcers searching uselessly along the corridors for a way out – I waited for more. I waited for the puppet men.
And what would they look like to Volski’s pion sight?
“There is a stairwell ahead,” Zecholas said. “As far as I can see it is empty.”
“Yes, and unguarded. No locks, no triggers. Nothing.” Volski paused. “But it will not take us all the way down.” A longer pause. “There is no way to get to the basement. No stairs, ramps, tunnels. Nothing.”
“That makes no sense,” someone hissed behind us.
“Either way, the stairwell will be more comfortable than this,” Zecholas said.
And sure enough his tunnel opened out to a dark, twisting stairway. It was narrow and musty, but vast and fresh compared to the inside of the building’s very stones.
Lad breathed deeply and let out a loud and echoing sigh. Yicor shushed him, while Fedor and his troop emerged, and Zecholas reconstructed the bricks to seal off the tunnel.
“I don’t see anyone close by,” Volski said. “But try to remain quiet anyway.”
“Sorry,” Lad squeaked.
I took Kichlan’s hand, stretched up and breathed into his ear, “Does this seem strange to you? That there are no doors accessing the basement?”
“Strange? Yes,” he breathed back. “But not as strange as an empty, unguarded stairwell in the middle of a highly defended building.”
He had a point.
“Enough whispering,” Fedor spat as he pushed past us. “Let’s move.”
No matter how hard they try, nine full-grown adults cannot descend a smooth, tight stairwell, and be silent about it. I felt every clang shudder through me, every cough and each footfall. And with each sound my suit tightened inside me, feeding on my tension and nerves. The energy it had stolen from the misfiring lock shivered through me in little cramps and spasms. But worse were the knots of muscle and silver in my abdomen. With each step they seemed to grow, with each breath the suit glowed brighter.
“Here?” Zecholas stopped suddenly and I bumped into him, zapping his back with the suit’s stored energy. He winced, and cast a hurt expression at me. I shrugged an apology. There wasn’t much I could do about it.
“Yes,” Volski added.
“Here what?” Fedor hissed.
“Here is the best place,” Volski explained.
Zecholas bent and touched the ground. The concrete was so cold I could feel it radiating up into my legs, through boots, uniform and heavy woollen pants. “There is a beam here, thick enough.” He glanced back at me, squinted against the light from my suit, the light I could not control. “This will be even harder, though.”
“Hurry,” I whispered.
I drew a deep breath and released Kichlan’s hand to tighten mine into fists. Gradually, my light dimmed. It was difficult and exhausting.
Zecholas tunnelled again. “Quick. This is unstable, I don’t want to hold it for too long.”
And I learned just how pleasant the original tunnel had been. Zecholas had cut a narrow tube down the concrete, reinforced by steel, that made up one of the building’s supporting beams. We had to squeeze ourselves down, no real hand holds, no convenient steps, but I knew it was all he could do to maintain the integrity of the entire building while providing enough space for us to fit through.
I trod on Lad’s head more times than I wanted to admit. He and Kichlan shimmied down before me, with far greater agility than was fair. I didn’t want to loosen my suit, though it would have been so much easier to rely on the strong and sharp silver. But if I let it out, even a few inches, would I have what it took to draw it back in? So I endured the scratching of rock, the way sharp pieces of steel frame tore holes in my clothing, and Fedor kicking my shoulders at every opportunity.
When I finally made it through and staggered on the blessedly stable, horizontal, tiled floor, Kichlan caught me. Fedor dropped from the ceiling with a grace that no man who had almost been fried by an over-active pion lock should possess.
Even Yicor, even an old man like him, hardly needed Fedor’s helping hand. And here I was, aching with each breath, sharp pains slicing through my abdomen.
“Tan? Are you all right?”
I couldn’t straighten. Not yet. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” I whispered, and watched fine lines of silver trace their way across fresh scratches in the back my hands.
At that, Kichlan just held me tightly.
“What is this?” Fedor shouted, apparently forsaking every pretence of stealth. His voice echoed as though we stood at the mouth to a great cavern. “Where have you taken us?”
I glanced up. Zecholas was closing off the last imperfection in the ceiling, and I allowed myself a moment to appreciate just how skilled a binder he was. Volski was still blank-faced, still our ever vigilant pion-sighted lookout. Yicor, however, seemed to have found a panel and turned on the lights.
They shone, small, not particularly bright, and spaced meanly down the long walls of an enormous room. They didn’t provide very much light, but it was enough to see that the basement was completely empty.
“There really aren’t any doors to this place,” Zecholas murmured. “How is that possible?”
“I can’t see anything,” Volski added. “Apart the ones inside us, all the pions are gone.”
Dread added its talons to the pains within me.
I stared in shock at the empty room. It had, I noticed with a numb kind of humming at the back of my head, not always been empty. There were lines on the floor and walls, and holes, where machinery had been bolted. I could distinguish the outlines of what looked like great vats, tubes, and shelves. Scattered with an apparently haphazard lack of consideration, were a few empty debris-collecting jars.
“Where is the debris?” Kichlan said.
“All that for nothing?” Fedor turned on me.
I drew a deep breath, held it, let the air ease away the sharper edges of my pain. Nothing about this laboratory was right, even I knew that. So I held Fedor’s furious eyes. “Why here?” I whispered.