Debris (2 page)

  "The block is nearly there!" Tsana's words came across clipped, and I hoped she wasn't tiring already. Grandeur was, well, a grand lady. She would take many more sixnights to complete, and for the two hundred thousand kopacks the veche was paying, I'd make sure we built her well. For moons we had crafted her, from sturdy, sand-filled legs to the crystalline squares of her glass-sewn gown. Hands, face and neck were all that remained to be done. But a face takes longer to sew than a dress, expression needs time and care. A light touch, the delicate detail.

  The rock the lifters hauled past the hem of Grandeur's sparkling, crystalline sleeve was enormous. To my architect's eyes it was a tangle of bindings, of tightly knotted energy giving it structure and form. Dense with material, shining with ore and sand and potential. I would build a hand from that rock.

  "Have you got it yet?"

  I took a small step from the edge, feet steady, steel the only thing between me and the ground. The obliging pions in the girder shone a bright path to follow. The boulder wobbled as it rose, jerking in the sky. The lifters were having trouble.

  "Hurry, my lady," Volski murmured by my ear.

  I shook out my fingers. "Ready now?" I whispered to the lights buzzing around my head like fireflies. I must have looked like flame from the ground, a tiny lit wick in an enormous candle. The toes of my boots hung out over space and a humid updraft.

  It seemed we had, in fact, already loosened a lot of debris. Debris was always followed by heat.

  I cupped my hands, repeating the gesture, and imagined holding the boulder there in my palms. The pions caught on quickly. They had trailed over my fingers like streamers woven from flowers. Now, they wrapped around the rock, cupping it in a tight, bright mesh. "Good little girls and boys," I whispered again. Then I sent down to my circle, "Patience, Tsana, Vol. Art and beauty, these things should not be rushed."

  Laughter does not carry up the circle. But I imagined a smile brightening Volski's ever-serious eyes. "Lifters are getting weary. The site is thick, so don't work them too hard."

  It was a lot of stone to lift so high and hold for so long, even without a throng of pions clogging the sky.

  I brought my cupped hands together, with more care than I had placed my feet. Falling didn't worry me; if I couldn't create myself something safe to land on, then I had nine people below me who could. But the pions guided by my hands, with their jostling, in their zest, they needed a focused mind and a firm grip.

  A gust of wind, warmth-tipped, billowed my jacket. The high collar of densely woven wool tugged at my throat. I locked fingertips and sent the pion horde drilling. They rushed to their duty, pushing inside the rock, sticking to its bindings, prying at its knots. Undoing its old form, and preparing it for a new existence in Grandeur.

  Once I could feel every grain as though they were pressed against my fingers – from smooth iron-ore to fine sand – I instructed Volski to give the lifters some rest.

  The rock was a sudden weight, and I braced my feet on the steel beam, leaning into the wind to compensate and regain my balance. I was not alone. The circle throbbed below me, around me, and even as I fed pions into the rock, even as they set about their dismantling and reconstruction, the circle found me more.

  Sweat on my neck, clammy wool. All part of the thrill, wasn't it?

  First, cement separated in a flurry of mud. I padded the hand bones with it, filled out the palm, was careful to lift my toes as it solidified at my feet. Next, more steel.

  Another gust of wind, and I staggered a half step onto thankfully dry cement. My interlocked fingers jerked in reflex. Particles tugged in an attempt to escape, but I had knotted them so tightly they could not slip out of place. Somewhere below me, the structure rattled. Just wind, surely, trying to knock Grandeur around like it was doing me.

  "Are you all right?" Tsana asked. "The wind's come up."

  "I noticed," I snapped off the words. "Be quiet and keep working. We're being watched, remember."

  Tsana was silent. The pions didn't carry sulking, either.

  Fingers are hard to fashion. I guided pions to the squareend edges of the metacarpals and set them to building knuckles out of steel. Grandeur was a statue, so she was hardly going to flex her hands or pick anything up, but I needed sufficient mass there and a strong enough supporting structure to keep the fingers stable. Grandeur had her arm outstretched, hand cupping. When I'd vied for the contract to build her I'd described this as a poignant way to show that Varsnia, even as wealthy and advanced as we are, was not beyond lending a helping hand to lesser nations, not beyond carrying an extra weight. Didn't mean I believed it, of course, but it had certainly convinced the veche.

  Another shudder ran through Grandeur's frame. Fine dust from her shoulder trickled in a soft waterfall behind me.

  "Did you feel that?" Tsana put aside her hurt ego.

  "Of course." I was standing on it.

  With a frown, I peered over the edge. The distant ground was hard to see with heat waves adding their haze, and a sky thick with lights. My circle was still complete and distinct, linked by varied colour and dotted with light like dew on a spider's web.

  Movoc-under-Keeper stretched out beyond the construction site, a sprawling city of dark stone and bright lights. Threads of thin, sharp pions surged between buildings, carrying light, carrying heat. Down along the Tear River, further south of the Keeper Mountain, factories burned. Thick patterns of orange rose above a rubbish disposal. Twisting, complex green over carpenters working. And on top of it all, the mess of the everyday. Lives made up of pions shifted, prodded, caressed and coaxed into action. It would be easy to say Movoc wasn't built of bricks, of cement and steel. It was erected on a frame of pions, it lived through them, and was lit by them. A true city of the revolution.

  All this was normal. Nothing amiss. Just a few more pions than usual, overexcited for reasons I did not understand. And the wind, battering Grandeur's glass dress. Swallowing vertigo, I returned to the steadily solidifying knuckles.

  "Tanyana?" Tsana's pions sped by so fast they took most of her voice with them. "I think something's wrong."

  I completed the knuckles, each a hub of steel with half a dozen smaller pins extended, ready to brace fingers. Only an eighth or so of the boulder's total mass had been used. I drilled for more ore, removed it, and started construction of five thick beams.

  "I need details, Tsana. Anything you say is useless to me without details."

  The wind hit again, harder still. And below, my circle flickered. No, not just my circle – all the pions in the construction site. Gone was their light, their colour. All I saw, for a slow and breathless moment, was Movoc as it would look without the pions that gave it life. The city was grey, wet, and darkness haunted its corners.

  They returned in a flurry, somehow faster, somehow thicker, and wilder than before.

  "There's too much interference, I can't keep the pions focused." Tsana's words spilled around me. "I don't understand why–"

  Llada burst in. "Systems are failing all over the site! The lifters are down: two of their stones have dissolved, they're trying to contain the third but, my lady, they can't even maintain a circle. The bonds in Grandeur's feet are loosening. Her hem. Her ankles. Other, we're losing pions and I can't stop–" Her thread of purple lights whipped free of the circle, thrashing unrestrained against the sky, and her voice disappeared. It only took her a moment to rejoin us but it was far too long for someone with her pion-binding skill.

  Other, what was happening?

  I took a deep breath, and put all thoughts of the inspectors out of my mind. I didn't need this now, not now while they were watching and reporting on me, but worrying about them would only weaken my focus. The safety of my circle, indeed my entire construction site, was my main priority. I would deal with the effect on my career later. "Everyone, come in close," I said. "Tighten the circle and you should be able to bring–"

  "They won't listen to me!" Tsana's jarring, sporadic voice peppered me as her pion thread tore violently through my fingers. "Too many–"

  "Can you hear me, my lady?" Volski, at least, remained calm. "You need to get this place back under your control."

  "I know. Shorten your threads–"

  "My lady? Can you hear me?"

  Other damn us, we couldn't even get through to each other. The site was just too bloated, overrun by wild, fierce lights. Any pions I sent down to my circle were surrounded, torn from their threads, and riled into abandon until they joined the powerful and unruly throng. And I didn't understand why. The pions were my friends, and had always been. When I called them from their home, deep in the layers of reality, they responded with enthusiasm, with joy. Not this.

  This felt like madness, and the very idea sent a chill over my skin.

  When we controlled them, pions could change the very structure of the world. But mad, like this, and out of our control, what would they do now?

  "No," I whispered to myself. "No, I won't let–"

  A great screeching sliced through my words. The finger bones, being carefully constructed only a moment before, writhed in the sky like pockets of termite-infested timber. I focused all my attention on them. I let go the circle below me, I ignored the chaos infesting the rest of the site and the inspectors, observing it all, scribbling away only the Other knew what in their reports. All I saw, all I knew, was those finger bones, and the tiny particles of energy bright within them.

  "Enough of this," I told the pions. My pions. Stern, but kind, I was a mother, a teacher, a firm hand. "We have a job to do. Enough."

  But they couldn't hear me, or wouldn't. So I approached them, balancing on hot steel beams wet with condensation. I reached up to the closest finger bone, placed my hand against its stretching, writhing notquite-metal-anymore form so the pions in me and the pions in it could touch, could mingle.

  "Listen–"

  But then, only then, so connected to the finger bone, so focused, did I see them.

  Pions, yes, but not like any pions I had never known. Red, painfully red, and buried so deep inside reality that even the collective skill in the building site below hadn't seen them. When I tried to communicate with them they burned like tiny suns and heat washed over me, and anger, such a terrible tearing anger I could feel from my head to my chest and deep, deep inside me. In my own pion systems.

  Gasping, I stumbled back. They bled out from the finger bone, infecting the particles around it, undoing all the bonds I had made. I spun, and they were everywhere. It wasn't the wind battering Grandeur around like she was little bigger than me. The crimson pions whirred around us like a nest of furious wasps. Bereft of any guiding structure they crashed indiscriminately against my statue, against my circle, the earth, the street. They infected every pion they touched and tore apart every system in their way.

  Desperately, I stumbled back to the edge of Grandeur's palm. My circle was holding on by only a few stubborn threads. Volski. Tsana. Llada.

  I drew all the clean pions I could gather into a single, solid thread and thrust it back down toward my circle. "Can you hear me?" I had to penetrate that mess, I had to warn them. "It's not the wind, do you understand? Let everything else go, look to the sky, the edges of Grandeur and you might see them. There are pions!"

  I was answered only by screaming below. Not passing my ears, not touching my senses with a brush of colour and scent. Below.

  The finger bones fell. Two crashed onto Grandeur's palm, only feet away, and there they lay, writhing. One dripped, hot like melted cheese, over the side. The other curled over itself in a snake-sex frenzy.

  Where had the others gone?

  More screaming and great thuds. I swallowed, clammy in my jacket, too hot.

  I had to take control. I was the only one who could. Not even my circle, skilled though they were, could see pions this sharp, this deep into the world.

  I ran hands through my hair. My short fringe stuck up hard, styling cream rearranged by sweat.

  Take control, but from whom? Who had coaxed these crimson pions from the deep places they must have slept in? Who had disturbed their dormancy? Pions could not be created, just as they could not be destroyed. So this anger, this burning rage, must have always existed, somewhere deep inside all things.

  Why had it been set free?

  Legs folded beneath me as I shook tension from my wrists, and reached out with open, cupping hands.

  The fiery particles slipped through my fingers. Not around them, like water, but through them. Like reflections on a wall, like shadows. Like my fingers weren't even there.

  "No!" Focus. Touch them, command them. Pions had listened to me since I was a child, been keen to please me, never hating me, never too wild to be caught, too angry to be soothed. "Don't let this happen!" My voice broke, I took shuddering breaths to try and control myself. How could I hope to control pions if I couldn't even do that? "I don't know who's doing this, but you don't have to listen to them. I'm here. You know me. Trust me, and come back. Come back to us."

  I could have been talking to empty air. Nothing changed, the chaos, if anything, grew fiercer. And while my fingers passed through them like I wasn't solid, those particles hooked themselves into the pion-bonds in my coat, my hair, the outer layers of my skin and dragged me forward. Grandeur shook. I could feel her swaying, as her systems were ruthlessly undone. Creaking eased around me, below me. Somewhere glass shattered. The threads of Grandeur's dress, pulling away?