Debris (22 page)

  "Natasha," he called her. "Could you bring the transport around, please?"

  Puzzled, I watched Natasha head behind the building. We waited in the cold silence, Kichlan staring at the ground, until Natasha reappeared on the coachman's seat of a small, decrepit wagon pulled by a squat, shaggy horse.

  A rusty axle squealed in the night. Painted in a peeling drab green, with cracks in what could once have been quite nice stained glass windows, I had no real way of knowing how old this former coach was. The wheels were wooden and bowed precariously, which gave it a bizarre, bobbing kind of movement. Where Natasha sat, all the cushions, the backing and any railings to give her some kind of safety were long gone. And the coach had no doors.

  Kichlan caught the expression on my face. "Feel free to walk the way you came." He helped Sofia climb rickety stairs into the coach.

  Mizra saved me from admitting I wasn't at all sure which way that was. "Don't be silly." He grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the coach. I was surprised to find Uzdal at my other shoulder, his hand at my lower back a gentle but no less insistent push to his brother's pull. "She's with us."

  "She's one of us now," Uzdal chimed in.

  I allowed the twins to bundle me into the coach. Sofia sat hunched in the middle of the opposite seat, left arm cradled around her middle, cheeks pale. Lad, Uzdal and Mizra squeezed in beside us. Kichlan told us there wasn't enough room for another body, and sat with Natasha at the dangerous driver's seat.

  I had never ridden in a coach drawn by a horse before. The ride was bumpy, cold and slow. There were no cushions inside either, and the no-longer-sealed wooden seat was hard and threatened splinters when I tried to brace myself with my hands. Icy air washed in from the gaping holes that should have held doors. By the time we came to Darkwater, dawn was brushing faint pink against the Keeper, and ice clogged the steps and edges of the coach's empty door frames.

  My collecting team disembarked in silence. Kichlan gave Natasha directions that could have led to Eugeny's house, and watched her, the horse and the coach rattle off into pale streets. The silence held as he unlocked the door, as he led us down the narrow stairs, and until he'd emptied the bag of full jars onto the shelves.

  And then, the inevitable came.

  Kichlan spun, he advanced on me like a hungry dog on a meal, and I fought to hold my ground. "You're dangerous!" He poked the air with a sharp finger. "You don't know what you're doing, you don't listen to instructions, you think you're still a veche architect and act like you're in charge and you nearly get people killed!"

  "And you made a hole in the ceiling," Sofia added, her voice soft and words slightly slurred.

  Briefly, I wondered how badly she had been hurt.

  "Yes!" Kichlan was almost on top of me. I met his fury squarely. Veins purpled his neck, a blotchy red flush darkened his cheeks and forehead. "You've been nothing but trouble, like I knew you would be! We don't need collectors like you, collectors who think they're still too good for this role. You're a burden, and you're trouble."

  "That would be two things," Mizra drawled.

  I peeked over Kichlan's shoulder. Mizra lay on one of the run-down couches, his feet up, studying a stray thread he was pulling from his gloves.

  "What?" Kichlan stopped trying to poke my eye out from a foot away and crunched the hand into a fist.

  "You said she was nothing but trouble, and then that she was a burden too. That's two things. She can't be nothing but trouble and also–"

  "Mizra, shut your useless, Other-made mouth!"

  "Yes, Miz." Uzdal sat in the couch beside his brother, chin resting on the palm of his right hand. "Give Kichlan his due. I'm surprised he waited until now to start shouting."

  "True, Uz, true," his brother answered. "We knew it was coming the moment he worked out who she was."

  "You two." Sofia, face pale and hand shaking, made wobbly cutting motions in the air. "Stop it."

  Kichlan seemed to be having trouble controlling his breathing. I watched a muscle twitching in his neck as he closed his eyes and squeezed his hands. "Where was I–?"

  "Trouble," Mizra said.

  "And a burden," Uzdal said.

  "Brother?" Lad's voice was a small squeak in a room of loud voices. "Brother, please?"

  If Kichlan heard Lad, he chose not to acknowledge him. "You–" he resumed his pointing-at-my-face violence "–should have listened to me. You're not too good to do what I tell you to, to come when you are called, to keep your mouth shut when I tell you to. To... to..." He seemed to have run out of words.

  I looked straight into that red, panting face, and was calm.

  Kichlan knew nothing about losing your temper. He did not understand putting the lives of others in peril. He did not know pressure, expectation, failure or horror. And he could not scare me.

  "Have you finished?" I whispered.

  The twitch started up again, fresh and violent. He opened his mouth; nothing came out.

  "Then you will listen to me." I stepped so close his finger touched my forehead, just above my eyebrow. Right on a bandage. "Do not tell me what I think. Do not put attitudes in my head or words in my mouth."

  "You–"

  "No!" I cut across him, snapped at the air like I could bite it, like I could take a chunk of it into my mouth and tear at it with my teeth. "No! You have said enough. You will listen."

  I was the head of a circle of nine, back in my life before Grandeur. I had kept the best under my control. The wealthy, the educated, the elite of the oldest families. This debris collector was a smudge on the bottom of my polished leather boot with the silver bear-head clasps.

  "Whatever problem you think you have with me was yours before we met," I continued. "I fell far. I fell from wealth and status and you know that, and it eats you. Well, this is it. No more. Keep your attitude buried some where with your decency, somewhere the sun will never touch it. I don't want to hear about it again. The problem is yours, not mine. Not ours."

  Sunlight glanced in through the narrow windows. A stray beam caught on the metal of an empty jar and sprayed across my face.

  "I have not come here to wrest your petty leadership away. I do not want it, I do not want to be here."

  "There, did you hear–?" Kichlan turned from me, imploring our small, silent audience. But I didn't let him. I reached up, grabbed his finger and jammed it against my bandage.

  "What would you expect? That I would want to fall? That I would want this pain, this disfigurement? I have lost more than you understand. More than kopacks. More than status. More than the respect I worked so hard for so long to earn! What can you expect? That I should have wanted that all to happen just so I can be here, with you, chasing garbage for the rest of my life?"

  He gaped at me, and had stopped trying to pull away.

  "What else did you say? That I don't listen? That I don't do what you tell me to do? I have listened to what instructions you gave me, but do not criticize me for failing to follow the ones you didn't give!" I released his hand and waved my wrist in front of his eyes. "If you'd chosen to explain these things to me I might have known what to do when the call came, I might have known what a call was! As it is, you were lucky to have my help at all."

  Not even Sofia leapt to Kichlan's defence.

  Pale, still breathing quickly, as though he'd been running as I shouted at him, Kichlan lowered his hand.

  "Now." I straightened, smoothed my sleeve and brushed my hair from my forehead. "Was there anything else?"

  "You still need to fix the ceiling," Sofia ventured.

  Stiff, I gave her a curt nod. "And I will. When I can afford to do so." The last words tasted dry, sandy.

  "You need to learn to control your suit," Kichlan said, when he had stopped panting. He stood tall, hands by his side. All thunder was gone from his face, in its place a kind of understanding. Like a clear sky.

  "And I will." I hoped he could see the same in my face. "You know I will."

  "Yes, I do. I should have realised earlier, I should have listened to L–"

  Together, we looked at his brother, and the argument was instantly banished. Lad was pale, shaking. He had wrapped his arms around his chest and wept silently.

  As one, the debris collectors went to his aid. Kichlan spoke softly into his brother's ear. Sofia, one arm still pressed against her waist, patted him with her free hand. Mizra and Uzdal hovered like fretting pigeons. I pried Lad's hands from the nook of his elbows and held them tightly.

  "Stop shouting. Can't shout. He says not to shout," Lad murmured, rocking from heel to toe.

  It took the rest of the morning to quiet Lad down. Finally, when the noon sun was as yellow as a layer of cloud would allow, Lad was calm enough to be guided home.

  I kissed Lad on the cheek and Kichlan graced me with a smile as we parted at the Darkwater street sign.

  As it turned out the ferry did run on Rest, but its trips were few, slow and far between. By the time it had taken me to the second Keepersrill and I had walked the long streets home, Devich was gone. He had left a note under the remaining strawberries from the night before, and I ate them hungrily as I read.

 

 
 
 
 

The next morning I developed a system. I rose at dawnbell and pulled on loose clothes over my collector's uniform. Then I walked to the Keeper's Tear River and rode the ferry to Section ten. Each trip cost only twenty kopacks, but it meant a long trek down the eighth Keepersrill to Darkwater.

  I knew, somewhere at the back of my weary brain, that I couldn't keep doing this forever. Travelling each morning was hard enough, and I couldn't afford the apartment itself for much longer. But it was my home, and so exclusive I had acquired its lease solely through the veche contacts of a member of my nine point circle.

  I would hold onto it as long as I could.

  The smell of food coaxed me down to the Darkwater sublevel. When I came to the bottom I realised some of the furniture had been moved. The table that held the empty jars was shoved inelegantly into the middle of the room, up against the end of a couch. The shelves had been pushed over to a corner. All this exposed an ancient, blackened fireplace, around which the entire team was huddling.

  "What's this?" I called as I approached them.

  "Morning!" Lad bellowed, and left the fireplace long enough to sweep me into a brief, crushing hug.

  "Morning," I croaked once he had let me go.

  Large, dusky embers glowed inside the fireplace, beneath two heavy iron pots. Something bubbled away under their half-closed lids and that was where the smell was coming from. The smell that set my stomach rumbling.

  "Guess what?" Lad, torn between me and the allure of the embers, rocked as he shifted his weight between the two of us.

  "What?"

  "Guess what Kich did? He said we all did something wonderful last night and he was going to give us something. So, you know what he did? He cooked!"

  "Did he?" The pots reminded me pointedly of Eugeny.

  Kichlan smiled at me over his shoulder. "When Lad and I first came here the old team leader would complain about the loss of his fireplace. A lot. You know how some people can't stop griping about the same, small, pointless–"

  Sofia cleared her throat discreetly.

  "Anyway, before we weighed down the shelves with yesterday's jars, I thought I'd give them a bit of a push and see if the fireplace still worked."

  Lad made inarticulate spluttering noises.

  "Well, I asked Lad to give them a good push. Better?"

  His brother nodded wildly.

  "Big sixnight ahead of us, and nice to have hot food before we head out, don't you think?"

  As the embers warmed my face I wondered how early Kichlan and Lad had arrived here, to get this all organised.

  It was worth the effort. Lad collected seven wooden bowls into which Kichlan spooned a kasha of buckwheat and raisins, thick with butter, crunchy with pecans, spiced with cinnamon and sweetened with honey. On this he poured apricots stewed in vanilla and a splash of what had to be brandy. I ate it hurriedly. It made me warmer and more comfortable than I had felt for a long time.

  Kichlan ate little, and gave most of his bowl to Lad. Before the rest of us had finished eating Kichlan was up, filling his leather bag.

  He waited, bag over his shoulder, for us to stack used bowls, lick spoons dry and give him our attention. Then he crossed his arms, lifted his chin and addressed us like a general to his troops. "We have a lot to catch up with. Thankfully, due to yesterday's emergency we have managed to bridge the gap somewhat, but you can be damned sure the veche will take that into account. So we need to work hard. I see long days ahead of us this sixnight. We must stop at every corner, look under every lamp–"

  Behind me, Natasha groaned. To my left, Mizra and Uzdal shifted simultaneous feet. Lad was watching his brother with something close to awe, and Sofia wasn't much different. All I could feel was a tired ache in my legs, but resolved not to let it show. This was my fault. I would help Kichlan correct it.

  "–we must find every last grain of debris there is to be found!" Kichlan's voice rose, it echoed from the sublevel walls. Did he expect us to start cheering? "And we will rely on you, Lad, to do that." He stepped forward. He placed a hand on Lad's shoulder, looked him in the eye. "Can you do it? Can you help us?"