Debris (3 page)

  No. I wouldn't let this happen. Not to me, and not to all the people below who trusted me, who relied on my strength and my skill not only to work such wonders, but to keep them safe while we did so. I would not let them down.

  So I stood, braced, haloed by blazing fire. I called out to the pions again and opened my arms wide. They rushed over to me from all across the site, and further out too, from the rest of the city, as far as my call could reach. I gathered every clean pion I could summon, anything that wasn't crimson and furious and blind, and wound them into tight, complex threads. Unstable without my circle's strength to support me, surrounded by the chaos of the construction site, still I tied my threads into all the weakening pion-bonds below me. I stitched up Grandeur's feet and legs where she had been rapidly dissolving; I injected solidity into the decaying finger bones; I recombined the lifters' stones and helped them reform their tattered circle; I caught the edges of my own, frayed circle, and bundled them together.

  "It's Tanyana! She's taking control–"

  "–restoring integrity! That's amazing, my lady, amazing–"

  "–can you come down? The bindings in her arm are still loose and we need–"

  Voices flashed at me, snippets of sound. The circle flashed with them, lightning strikes of panic.

  I strained to hold them all, to control so many pions and keep their threads safe, solid. And it looked, for a moment, like I was winning. I, and my binding, was stronger than the furious crimson pions trying to undo us. Grandeur strengthened, the circles below hardened into solid colour and began channelling fresh pions of their own. More binders were joining us, emergency and relief crews, and I even allowed myself to smile, and whisper to my pions, "There, do you see? We can do it. Together we are strong."

  Until all the bright and furious lights slowed in their whirling chaos, then stopped, hanging like too-close stars in the air around me. They flashed, coordinated, and my stomach clenched as they gathered into a wide and terrible thread of red light. And attacked.

  They did not attack Grandeur again. Not the circles below, not anything else in the construction site. This time crimson pions attacked me, and only me. They crashed into me, through me. And all my threads were torn from my control, and all the systems inside my body cried out and jumbled up, and I stumbled forward, toes on the edge of Grandeur's palm. I burned, and the sky burned with me, for an instant of tortured brilliance before they all disappeared. The bloat of crimson, the normal few, every last pion that lit Movoc-under-Keeper was gone.

  And in their place, darkness. A sea of the wigglingworm stuff.

  
Tanyana, is it? Welcome.
And a single voice, a whisper more imagined than real.

  Metal screeched and shuddered at my feet. Strangely numb, I turned to see Grandeur crack below her elbow. For a moment we hovered, her arm and I, in a strange handshake eight hundred feet in the air. She took her time deciding which way to fall. Then the sky tipped, pions pushed, my soft-soled feet slipped forward, and I was free.

  Silver knuckles shone, bright in the sunlight of a clear day, and even as I fell I squinted back to watch them arch toward me, filling the blue sky. She was Grandeur to the end. Not content to throw me to the earth and away from the safety of my nine point circle, she had to slap me on the way down.

 
 
 
 

When I opened my eyes again the world was empty.

  I lay, propped up on hard pillows in a bed that creaked beneath me with each breath. The room was not my own. A white-painted ceiling; beige walls dotted with washed-out pictures; a chair in each corner; a small table. A lifeless room, certainly not home. But that was not what made it empty. The pions were gone. The walls were colourless and hollow without them, the tiled floor dull and flat. No bright connections between particles, no flickering eagerness, no foundations of light.

  Empty.

  A man sat beside the bed. His skin was pallid, surprisingly free of freckles or sunspots, his hair so blonde it was almost white. His eyes were a faint, dirty kind of green.

  His jacket was dull. His striped shirt, his woollen pants: there were no pions in them either.

  "Where are the pions?" I tried to turn my head and ask. But pain surged up like a tide at the movement, and my mouth felt full of cloth and too weak to form proper words. I wavered, and from the corner of my eye caught sight of what had once been my left hand. Wrapped in thin linen I could see through it to something dark that wound its way over my fingers. Fingers too misshapen, twisted, and thick to be mine.

  Those former fingers cleared my head. Those former fingers were terrible enough that I could turn my neck and speak.

  "Where am I?" My voice was raw and dry. "Who are you?"

  Face like a statue, the man watched me. Not impatient, not bored or even caring. Nothing. "I am glad to see you awake, Miss Vladha." His voice reminded me of ice over a lake. Cold. Smooth. Dangerous. With a strangely halting hand he drew an insignia from his jacket and showed it to me, a roaring bear's head ringed by nine concentric circles. "I represent the national veche. I am here about the incident."

  Grandeur. Oh, Other.

  I gathered what authority I could. What had happened at the construction site – those crimson pions and the chaos they had wreaked – that was not my fault. "Do you know who summoned them?" I asked. Something tugged at my face with the croaking words. Dimly, I was aware of the thin, almost paper-like gown I wore. It crinkled softly beneath the weight of blankets. It was mostly transparent, and I knew I should have been embarrassed beneath the man's constant appraisal. I wasn't. Because there were bandages between gown and skin. A dark shape beneath sheer green.

  He blinked. A long and precise movement. "I beg your pardon?"

  "The crimson pions." I swallowed hard. Other, I could have killed for water. "They disrupted our systems, they undid my bindings. They pushed me. Do you know who unleashed them?"

  "The only person responsible for your statue, Miss Vladha, was yourself."

  He had misunderstood me. "No, no. I was attacked. Pions too deep for the others to see, but I saw them. They broke Grandeur, they pushed me off the edge. You need to find out who did this!"

  The veche man shook his head. Sharply to the left, then to the right. "Listen to yourself. You know how impossible this sounds."

  "But there were–"

  "Pions the members of your own nine point circle couldn't see, let alone three qualified veche inspectors?" He lifted the corner of his mouth in a precise sneer, before dropping it back to the expressionless thin line. "The incident has been before a veche tribunal. The inspectors reported none of this. Neither did your circle, or the lifters, or the healers. No one. Grandeur was your contract, Miss Vladha, and you must take responsibility for it."

  A veche tribunal?

  Unsettled, I glanced around the room. How long had I been sleeping here? Why would the veche hold a tribunal about Grandeur before I could attend? Panic rose like the returning of blood to a limb. This couldn't be right.

  "No." I seized the edge of the bed. "The veche can just open a new tribunal. If you're not going to listen to me, then they will. You just sit there and I will–" I tried to swing my legs over the side of the bed. Pain flared along my left side and instead of storming out to find justice, and answers, I fell back against the pillows.

  The veche man watched, and offered no help. "As you can see–" his voice maintained that emotionless monotone "–you are in no position to do anything. The tribunal is closed. The veche, whom I am here to represent, will not open a new one. People with injuries like yours often find themselves confused. I suggest you put these supposed memories behind you. I suggest you concentrate on the future."

  Injuries. "What happened to me?" I swallowed. "What have the healers done to me?"

  "The healers did the best they could. Your wounds were more extensive than you realise. Trauma to the brain has rendered you unable to see or manipulate pions. The veche extends its well wishes in this difficult time."

  What was he saying, in that uncaring monotone? The brain? Pions?

  I touched my head with gingerly soft fingers. No padding there, no pain.

  Had I dreamt up that wild, crimson force that had thrown me from Grandeur? But it was all so vivid, and I would not have fallen, could not have fallen, unless I had been pushed. But he didn't believe me. "What does this mean?"

  "You have cost the veche significantly, and we will give you the opportunity to pay us back. Once you can get out of bed." He didn't even offer his hand as he stood, but I found myself looking up to watch him go.

  The door to my room opened up to a white-tiled corridor. After the veche man had left a gradual stream of men passed by. Most wore long white coats over their clothes and talked in hushed tones. What was this place, some kind of hospital? Strange pictures on the walls caught my eye. Faint sepia ghosts of arms, legs, and what had to be someone's waist, although I couldn't understand why anyone would hang an image of a waist on a wall. In each of those glimpses I thought I saw jewellery. Bracelets, necklaces.

  That was odd, surely. For a hospital.

  Odder still, because these images hadn't been created using pions. What were they, drawn by hand? With ink – actual, physical ink? Or were they photographs? It was hard to imagine anyone still did any of that. And yet, if they had been rendered, I wouldn't have even known they were there.

  Rendering was reasonably common nowadays. It involved the manipulation of tiny particles – water droplets, all kinds of dust, even hapless insects in the wrong place at the wrong time – and arranging them in just the right way to catch and reflect carefully directed light so an image resolved itself, apparently out of thin air. A truly skilled nine point rendering circle could create a life-size duplicate, detailed right down to the pores on their subject's skin, of shimmering light and colour that could stand like a statue or attach itself to a wall like a painting.

  The left side of my body felt heavy, weighed down by dread, by the wrongness of it all. I lifted my left hand, placed it in my lap, but couldn't bring myself to peel back those bandages, to look at those fingers.

  "You have to come back," I said to the particles of light that had always been my friends and would not, could not have abandoned me now. "Do you hear me?"

  I wrapped my right hand around the ruin of my left and slowly, slowly began to squeeze. Pain like fire, like the burning of hot lights, sparked deep beneath my skin. Still, I squeezed, as though I could just force the pions back out from wherever they were hiding. Maybe, if they saw how much I needed them, they would return.

  Pions had always come when I called.

  I remembered running through the tight corridors of the textile factory my mother had worked in, prying loose the pion streams of their small and ungainly circles with nothing more than a whispered word. My mother was not a skilled binder, but she did what she could to provide, widowed and burdened with a precocious little brat like me. It was so easy, it had always been. A hook of my finger, a smile and a call and the factory workers' thin aubergine pions lightened to sharp pink, flocking around me. The other members of the factory circles must have hated me, but I never even noticed. Not with so much light all gathered in my hands.

  I squeezed, gasping in difficult, hitching breaths. Push past the pain. Pions were there, somewhere, deep in a world that had always opened up for me, that had never felt as solid and impenetrable as this.

  My first year studying at Proud Sunlight was when I really started to realise that I was different. I didn't come from a wealthy family with a strong pion-binding ancestry; in fact, I could only afford to attend at all because of the scholarship my skills had bought me. And I was young, compared to the rest of the students, a sixteen year-old girl surrounded by men and women at least four years older and all vastly more experienced.

  They were surprised, so surprised, that I could keep up with my lessons. Keep up, and exceed them. Three moons into my first year and an experimental circle in the military sublevel collapsed in on itself, threatening to drag most of the riverside wing with it. I still remembered that feeling, standing in the middle of the churning, tattered remains of their six point circle, fearless, at peace, because the power and the energy rolling around me was my friend. The only friend I had in such a strange place.

  I'd opened my arms to it. I'd let those pions play across my skin, touch my own systems, grow to know me, to trust me. As they always did. And I'd whispered calming words, like a mother to her child. And I'd stroked their tense formations, like soothing a wild beast. Working together, the pions and I unravelled the circle that had so entangled and enraged them, and then put right the building they had almost destroyed.

  And I'd realised, in the aftermath, that I might be different and I might be poor, but with pions beside me none of that mattered. With my skill, with their help, I'd form myself a new identity.

  So this wasn't possible, couldn't be possible. They had to come back, they couldn't leave me. We were all connected: the pions gave me strength and I gave them purpose.

  I squeezed harder. Something tore beneath the bandage and I gasped at the sudden rush of pain. But no lights came with it. It was like the pions just couldn't hear me any more, as I couldn't see them. The world had become a barrier between us.

  And I was alone. And everything I had worked for was gone.