Suited (32 page)

I’m sorry. Please, tell him. I am so sorry
.

I swallowed on a tear-thickened throat, and leaned away. “Why can I hear you?” I whispered.

“What?” Kichlan said, but I silenced him with dirty fingers on his lips.

I held his confused gaze. “The Keeper says he is sorry. So sorry.”

Kichlan’s dark brown eyes turned distant, for a moment. “I used to be so angry with him, I used to think he would be the end of L– my brother. Turns out he didn’t need outside interference to place himself in death’s path. He made that decision on his own.”

Or it was my fault. All a matter of interpretation.

Unblinking, I held his gaze in silence.

“Wait.” He stepped from the circle of our broken embrace and smeared the crimson on his lips with his own, bloodier hand. “You can hear him? But, you’re not–” he waved his hand over me in a terribly dismissive gesture.

“Exactly. So, why can I hear you?”

Nothing.

Ignoring Fedor as he fidgeted, his gestures overstated and his shuffling feet loud, I closed my eyes and released a long breath. I had not imagined that voice. I was not as broken as all that.

–only sometimes
.

“There you are,” I breathed.

I don’t understand, Tanyana. There is so much of me inside you now, maybe that is why. But you and I have been connected for so long, and you have heard me before, you must remember that. Even so, I think this is different
.

So much of him, in me? The suit was debris, yes, but debris twisted and mutilated and used. Was that really him? And if I was so much of him, then what would that make me?

If I did not know better I would say you were a Half. You are not, Tanyana. Halves cannot be made, they must be born. But I feel you, so close to me. I feel the debris in your veins
.

The debris.

I opened my eyes and looked back over the vats. After everything it had cost us to come here, were we really going to leave without doing what we could to give strength to the Keeper, to make him whole or heal some of his scars?

“Tanyana?” Fedor, exasperated, had ordered his Unbound to leave. “You are delaying us.”

Kichlan escorted his brother’s body through Volski and Zecholas’s path, and did not look back. Sofia and Natasha followed. Fedor muttered something and left the basement. Only Mizra, Uzdal, Volski and Zecholas remained. And the Keeper.

Lad would have stayed with me. He would have understood what needed to be done, and none of his collecting team would have left without him.

To Mizra’s shocked cry and Uzdal’s spitting curse, I released the bonds on the suit at my neck and wrists and allowed it to coat my face and hands. It did not tug for freedom, it did not demand strength. A tool, a limb, it did as I commanded.

How long would that last?

The Keeper stood before me. His tears still flowed though he did not quiver or sob. “You should go with them,” he said. “Be with him. The Half, Lad. He would not want to be alone.”

I nodded. “I will. But first, I will do what I can to help you.”

I approached the closest vat, the one that had been broken when the ceiling caved in. Its door had shrunk, and it did not strain at its hinges and locks. The result, no doubt, of the debris the Keeper had consumed. “Be ready.”

Lifting a suited fist, I withdrew the mask from my eyes and plunged my hand through the vat. I did not try to bond with it – silver to silver – not this time. Two more sharp blows, faster than I should have been able to move, and the vat cracked open. Debris bubbled from the fissure like blood from broken skin.

Ah! Thank you
.

Vat to vat, I broke them open, no need for delicacy, surely, or for subtly now, and released fat and floating grains of dark debris into the air. Strange to say, but they looked healthy. No straining, fierce planes driving them, no twisted humanoid form or murderous, implacable snakes, this was debris. Clean, normal, like I had first seen as I fell from Grandeur’s palm, before I even knew what it was.

The vats squealed alarm with every shell I broke. Their cries echoed harsh and painful from the close basement walls. Until Mizra pried a chunk of loose concrete from the ill-made floor and smashed each dial, each glass tube, each flashing red light, and silenced them.

“They’re too loud,” he snapped into the ear-ringing silence when he was done, and threw the chunk of rubble down hard.

“Thank you,” I said.

He ignored me.

With all the vats split and silenced, I suited my face again. The Keeper stood, arms outstretched, head tipped back, while the debris flowed into him like water to a pond. It eased into his body through his very skin, and with piece he grew more solid – his skin white, his pulse hidden – and the doors faded, until there was nothing left but darkness, and random fragments of loose debris, and the Keeper.

“Thank you,” he gasped. “This feels – I can’t say, I can’t really describe – but I am real again.”

“Then that is something.” Not justification for Lad’s death, because nothing was worth that, but something.

“You should go.” The Keeper looked at me for a moment. His black eyes were so rich, I thought I saw stars in their depths. “Be with him. Be with them both.”

“Yes.” Kichlan needed me. I needed to be with him.

As I turned, as I began to withdraw my suit, I noticed a stray grain floating aimlessly past my legs. I bent, gripped it with my suited fingers and went to add it to the stream of similar grains rushing to fill the Keeper. But it wiggled in my grip for merely a moment, hardly long enough for me to straighten, before sinking into my silver and being absorbed into the suit.

I blinked down at my empty hand, rubbing fingers against each other. They were not dirty. There was, in fact, no evidence that the grain had existed at all. I decided I had imagined it, until I felt the debris – a solid, distinct lump – continue its merry way up through my arm, beyond my shoulder, to settle at the growing scars on my chest. It sent quivers through me, a joy so unlike the suit’s bloodthirst. In the wake of the debris I felt pure, clean, like I had just drunk deeply of clear water.

A glance over my shoulder and the Keeper had tipped his head back again, his eyes closed. He had not noticed.

I withdrew the suit from my face and hands. Then I followed Mizra and Uzdal out of the basement. Volski and Zecholas came last, sealing the path behind us.

We could not keep Lad’s body in the subterranean street with us. I understood that, I knew the reasons, but watching Eugeny and Fedor try to convince Kichlan to give his brother up still made me feel sick. I felt some of his desperate need to hold Lad close, as close as possible, and not let strangers take him away. Even in death, Kichlan protected his brother.

When Eugeny rejoined us he had become a different man. Older in a way that made him thin, his skin like paper and eyes watery, not entirely focused, weak to the point where he was unable to descend the ladder on his own, and shuffled as he walked.

He took my hands, bent his face over them. “He was a good boy,” he mumbled, voice hoarse. “I told you, he cared for you. He loved fully, our Lad did. He loved with everything he was.” His mouth sounded wet, strangely toothless. So much less than the Eugeny I knew. He was not carrying his pipe, either.

Valya had accompanied Eugeny. She did not stoop, she did not weep. She sat, instead, by Yicor’s form, so still she could have been a Keeper statue herself, and stared at him; silent and utterly alone.

And when Valya had done her sitting and Eugeny his weeping, then talk turned to removal, to burial.

“We need to do the best we can,” Fedor said. “To say goodbye.” His face was ashen, he watched Eugeny with the same disquiet I felt. “Lad was a Half. He deserves a Half’s farewell.”

A few curious faces looked up at that. Most of the Unbound had returned to the surface, they did not feel in any danger from a veche hunting collectors and spies. But those closest to the dead remained. The mourning remnants of the debris collecting teams could not leave. Nor my pion-binders, uncertain whether they still had a circle outside. We all hid in the domed building for two days, or what felt close to it, for it was impossible to know without the movement of the sun or the chiming of the bells.

“What’s a Half’s farewell?” Mizra asked, his voice raw, his eyes red.

“They who served the Keeper should be honoured when they die.” Fedor cleared his throat. “There are old ways, Unbound ways, to bury a Half. I have read some of them. I think we should perform them, as best we can. For him.”

Kichlan was sitting on the floor beside his brother’s body. For a long moment, he did nothing. Then slowly, he looked up at Fedor. “Lad was a good Half,” he whispered. “And he was proud of that. He tried hard, very hard. I think,” he glanced at me, “I think he would have wanted to leave us like a true Half would.”

I closed my eyes. What else could we give Lad on this final journey? We could not walk into the regional veche registry to organise a proper farewell and a plot of earth beside his father and his mother beyond the city walls. Perhaps that was part of why Kichlan agreed. Because he could not give Lad what he deserved, not even rosemary for his grave.

First, they built him a coffin. It would not be a real one, because he could not be buried here with us. Really, it was nothing more than a poor attempt to recreate an ancient ritual we did not fully understand. The coffin was rough, just a ragged pile of the quartz-like stones scattered on the street, but Fedor would not allow Volski or Zecholas to help. It had to be done with hands, not pions. I supposed that was only fair.

The real ones were beautiful
, the Keeper murmured soft commentary in my ear.
Carved out of large slabs of precious stone, covered with symbols and words and designs. They shone like they were full of stars. So pretty. Of course, not functional, but it’s all symbolic, isn’t it?. Just like this, it’s the thought that counts
.

Functional? I shuddered.

The death of a Half used to send whole towns, or cities, into mourning. Once the Half was laid in their coffin, and as they were readied for the final farewell, mourners would visit. They placed gifts around the glowing crystal. A lot of flowers
. The Keeper paused.
I think Lad would have liked the flowers
.

Fedor began painting Lad’s face. He used mud and ground up stone and blood to trace symbols across his cheeks, forehead and neck, similar to the ones that bobbed and shone on my suit’s silver bands; the ancient language of the Unbound. None of us, let alone Fedor, knew what it meant.

This demonstrates that the Half is changing. Lad is no longer bound by the limitations of his body. He is becoming pure again, returning to his original state
. The Keeper’s voice took on a slightly pained tone.
I know he is doing his best, but Fedor is using all the wrong symbols. And they should not be written in mud, but silver, or gold. Something treasured. Something conductive
.

That caught me off guard. “You can read the symbols?” I whispered, careful to keep as quiet as I could.

Of course. But these are meaningless. Just snippets, really. Fragments. They do not sum up Lad, all he is, all he has done. The great sacrifice he made for us all. That is what the symbols should do. They should create him. Remake him in words and ideas
.

Fedor hummed as he worked, rocking on his heels.

And here he should be chanting, not humming. Fedor should read out all he has written on Lad’s skin, and the Unbound, even other Halves, can add their own words to the pattern. It should be loud enough to echo through the doors. But that’s symbolic too, you know. Because sound doesn’t work that way
.

Finally, Fedor stood. He bowed to Lad, and faced Kichlan. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice broken. “That’s all I know. We don’t have much to go on, and I don’t know what it means. But it’s something, isn’t it? It’s something.”

It’s more than has been done for Halves in a very long time. Fedor should be proud of that. He doesn’t have the tools to complete the rituals, anyway. The hubs, for example, are all inoperative, and the Halves that exist now wouldn’t be able to help, even if we found them
. He sighed.
My Halves weren’t always like this, you know. Scared all the time, confused, and slow to understand. They once had strength you cannot imagine. They were once my voice, my helpers. But that was so long ago
.

Kichlan took Fedor’s place by Lad’s head. He dipped his finger into the simple paint, and traced his own patterns on his brother’s skin. He shook so hard they came out as shapeless lines. “Goodbye, Lad,” he whispered. “Goodbye.”

It broke my heart. Instead of watching, I squeezed through the doorway and made my way to the statues draped in their shadows and time. I ran fingers around the outline of once-dark eyes, over the threaded, crystalline stone.

“What happened to the Halves?” I asked. “What changed them? Where have the powerful ones gone?”

The Keeper was silent, but I could feel his presence beside me. Finally, he said,
I don’t really know. But recently, I have started to think it might be... interference. Something, or someone, is blocking them as they are sent to me. Scrambling them, so when they arrive they aren’t quite right. Not quite whole. This weakens me, you see
.

And who did we know was intent on weakening the Keeper? “The puppet men?” I breathed the words.

But if that is true, then it has been happening for a long time. How could they have been doing this to me, and I didn’t know? Am I really that useless
?

Long enough for Halves, and the Keeper himself, to slip out of memory and into myth. Surely, then, it wasn’t possible. I swallowed. “Just before before Aleksey killed Lad, they called him something strange. A word I didn’t understand.”

Programmer
.

“Yes! What is that? What did they mean?”

“Who are you talking to?” Volski said, behind me.

I jumped, and turned. I hadn’t heard him follow. “The Keeper.” I patted the statue, and he lifted his eyebrows at me.

“So, that’s what the Keeper looks like, is it? “ He leaned forward, squinting to see in the low light. “Not much left. Do you want me to…?” He flicked his fingers in a light gesture that somehow, I understood. We had been bonded in our circle, hadn’t we? And still weren’t so far apart.

I shook my head. “No. This was made by the hands and tools and sweat of the Unbound, in Movoc-under-Keeper before the revolution. No manipulated pions should ever shape it.”

“Understood.” So he traced what remained of the statue’s shape and form with his fingers alone. “You should be in there,” he whispered.

Guilt tickled through me. “I can’t.”

“But Kichlan, he–”

“Don’t say he needs me, Volski. Don’t even think it.” I leaned against the cold touch of the stone. “He needs his brother. Do you think I can stand there in his place?”

“You are not a substitute for Lad, you never were. Not to Kichlan.”

He did not understand. “Lad died trying to protect me. So what do you think I could possibly say now to make up for that? What could I possibly do?”

A pause. I hoped he was about to leave me be.

But Volski grabbed my wrist and pulled me from the shadow and the chill. He glared at me, eyes brimming with a furious kind of tears I’d never thought I’d see from him. “You are an idiot.”

I blinked, too shocked to pull away.

“You are still my lady, you always will be. And I will follow you, even when disaster strikes in your wake. But you are an idiot.”

“You–”

“Quiet.” He growled the word. He actually growled. “Don’t hide behind guilt you do not deserve, don’t bandage this pain with self-loathing and blame. Kichlan does not need his brother now. His brother is dead. Did you hear that? Dead.”

I tugged away and Volski released me. But his eyes arrested me.

“So he needs you, Tanyana. Like he’s needed you since I’ve met him, though you’re so thick or stubborn or just plain stupid, you don’t see it. Or you don’t want to, maybe. As if I could ever understand you.” He crossed his arms and bit his lip to hold back tears. “So you just go over there and be with him, because he needs that right now. He might not know it himself – he’s almost as thick as you, isn’t he? – but just do it.”

I gaped at him. When I was his critical centre Volski would not have dared raise his voice and speak to me like that. But then I had never seen his calm veneer crack so thoroughly.

“Go!” He grabbed my shoulder and gave me a push into the street, just as tight groups of Unbound emerged from the domed building, carrying the bodies between them. There was no way to bury the bodies without approaching the veche so the plan, as I understood it, was to slip them into the Tear River. Let the Keeper’s tears wash his dead away. The thought filled me with horror. Kichlan followed, still reaching for his brother, surely thinking the same thing.

I used Volski’s momentum and broke into a run. I took Kichlan’s hand and drew him close to me. I held his wrists by my side, I pressed our chests together and laid my cheek on his shoulder. So familiar a stance now, body to body. But this time, he shook against me in grief, not desire, as he watched over the top of my head that slow and sad procession disappear into the darkness.

“I should be with him,” Kichlan whispered.

I squinted, one eye pressed closed against his shirt. Volski was gone, Fedor had followed his Unbound, and the street was lit by the struggling lights of our suits alone. No longer that bright and signalling blue, Kichlan and I radiated a kind of sickly, cloud-pressed moonlight.

“He should not be alone.”

I knew how he felt. It throbbed within me too: the need to watch over Lad, to guard him, to soften this ugly world for him. With him gone that need left an emptiness, a sense that something was wrong, so fundamentally wrong. Which, of course, was true. Everything was wrong without him.

“He would be scared–”

I leaned back, released his wrists, touched two fingertips to his lips, and said the last thing I wanted to say. “He is gone, Kichlan. Lad does not need us any more.” I hated myself with each word. I tensed and waited for Kichlan to shove me away, to shout at me. Any of the things I so richly deserved. But for a very long moment – his short, hot breath grazing my fingers – we watched each other while the words hung between us.

Then he sagged. “I know.”

I let my hand drop. His warmth travelled through my metallic patterning to lodge somewhere aching in my chest.

“But I should still be with him. I need to be there. Instead, I am here.” He fixed flint-like eyes on me and I slid my gaze away. After all, it was my fault.

Fedor and his Unbound began trickling back along the street, now empty-handed. I wondered how they had got the bodies – Lad, Yicor, Yan and Anna – up the long ladder and through the trapdoor to Lev’s shop. I did not really want to think about it.

Kichlan turned his back on them. I continued to look at the floor. And we remained so, long after they had squeezed their way into the crowded, airless domed building.

I needed to get out of there.

But I could not move.

Then the light from Kichlan’s suit flared weak in my eyes, and I looked up to find him close to me again, brushing hair back from my forehead.

“What happened, Tan?” He breathed the words. They sent every scar on my face tingling. “When…” His hand stilled, he caught himself, and pressed on. “When Lad died. During your fight with Aleksey. What happened to you?”

I refused meet his eyes. “What has been happening to me from the beginning; I am what they made me.”

He began to shake his head, but I did not give him the chance to speak his reassuring lies.

“But I was, Kichlan, so utterly their weapon. Even before Aleksey brought it out of me, I had given up. Given myself to the silver. Bargained with it, promised it battle, promised it blood if only it would help me kill the puppet men. So what do you think that makes me, if not a weapon?”

A small frown flickered over his face. “You bargained with it?”

I supposed it was too much to ask him to understand that. “Don’t you see?” I whispered. “I am alive when I should be dead, I am suit where I should be skin.”

“You mean, like these?” His soft touch traced my temple, the notch in my ear, and the countless flecks across my cheeks. Day by day a little bit more of my face peeled away, as though my skin was a costume and silver my natural hue.

“No. They are nothing, they are petty, cosmetic. That is not what I mean.”

“Then show me.”

And demonstrate just how thoroughly I had lied to him? “I–”

“Show me what they have done to you, what you think you have become. What you have been hiding from me.” His voice shook “Why they killed Lad.”

I didn’t move, not even to stop him as he removed my jacket and began, hands shaking, to unbutton the filthy woollen shirt I wore. So terribly the same as before – in the darkness and the silence – yet entirely different. And I wondered if anything would ever be the way it was in the room above Valya’s house again.

He concentrated on my shirt with unnerving intensity, and I watched his eyelids and creased forehead as he worked. So I caught the moment of shock, the way his eyes widened and flickered up to meet mine, but only for an instant.

Finally, I glanced down.

He had exposed what was left of my uniform. Torn by two great rents across my chest, the tough boning splintered and hanging loose in every place Aleksey’s fists or suited blades had struck me. I was surprised the garment held its shape at all; surprised it still clung to my body. What use was it now, so limp and broken?

“How–?” but Kichlan stopped himself from asking the obscenely obvious.

Was that enough to shock him? With a grim set of my mouth, I shrugged off my open shirt. I wrapped my fingers around the edge of my weakened uniform and peeled it free.

The shift I wore beneath it was in a worse state and no longer an aid to modesty. But I did not care. Because he was Kichlan, who had touched every part of me that was not suited, and because so little of me was skin any more. Was I ever truly naked, if most of me was suit?

But I stayed my fingers at the top of my pants. The old, deep scars over my belly were still my own, my secret, my dread. And Kichlan did not need to know what might have once been living beneath them, or might even still be. Since Aleksey had tried to kill me, since the suit had taken me over, I did not know if the unborn child remained. I’d expected telltale signs like blood and pain to herald its death. So far, nothing. And I did not know what that meant.

Kichlan did not notice my hesitation. His face had drained, became sickly, almost fluorescent in the haunting suit light. His shaking now more pronounced, he took hold of the strips of dirty cotton shift and drew them from my shoulders.

My heavy silver scars reflected his light as Kichlan paced around me, circling. Each brush of clothing, each touch of his breath or the air he displaced with his movement, sent shivers across my skin. I glanced down at myself, because it was easier than watching his face, as pale and expressionless as the marble Keepers.

The scars on my chest had healed. No more red and puckered skin, just smooth, and one with my flesh. They were bigger than I remembered them. I placed a hand on the one over my heart and it filled my open palm. The metal was warm, when I moved it did not jut awkwardly into the flesh around it the way the scars on my abdomen did. These felt more a part of me, less the attack of an invading force, than was comfortable.

“They go right through you.” Kichlan stood behind me and whispered. “Are you silver the whole way?”

“Yes.” How could I sound so calm?

“And this is because the suit? This is what the veche has done to you?”

I nodded. “And if they had not, then I would be dead too.”

He hardly seemed to be breathing. Was he thinking that it wasn’t fair? If Lad had worn my suit then he too could have lived. Or was he looking at the ruin that was my body – from Grandeur’s pale scars, to the filled-in surface scratches, to the great holes bright in our suit light – and realising that, perhaps, Lad was the lucky one?